{"id":1121,"date":"2011-12-29T10:02:13","date_gmt":"2011-12-29T10:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=1121"},"modified":"2012-01-06T17:14:49","modified_gmt":"2012-01-06T17:14:49","slug":"featured-writers","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=1121","title":{"rendered":"Featured Writers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hard-Boiled and Noir Writers Featured in the 2011 Milne Archive Preview Exhibition<\/span><\/h3>\n

The 2011 Milne Archive Preview Exhibition showcased the work of some of the writers who were most important in establishing the traditions of American hard-boiled and noir crime fiction between the 1920s and the 1950s: \u00a0Dashiell Hammett,\u00a0Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, Steve Fisher, Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith.<\/p>\n


\n<\/a>\"Hammett<\/a>
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler:\u00a0defining an American tradition of crime writing<\/span><\/h3>\n


\n<\/a>\"Hammett,<\/a>Dashiell Hammett wrote stories for Black Mask<\/em> from 1922 until 1930.\u00a0 His greatest novels \u2013 Red <\/em>Harvest<\/em>, The Dain Curse<\/em>, Maltese Falcon<\/em> and The Glass Key \u2013 <\/em>were <\/em>all published first as Black Mask<\/em> serials.\u00a0 In his short career, he did more than anyone other than Chandler to transform American crime fiction, writing in clean, colloquial prose that was unsparing in its representation of contemporary American life. Chandler emphasized Hammett\u2019s importance in defining the hard-boiled style in \u201cThe Simple Art of Murder\u201d (1944), arguing that what he had created was an identifiably American variety of crime fiction, very unlike traditional detective fiction in being written \u201cfor people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life [who] were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Raymond Chandler started writing for Black Mask<\/em> in December 1933, just as Hammett\u2019s writing career was ending. Within six years, Chandler had written twenty more stories, most of them for Black Mask<\/em>. In 1938 he started work on The Big Sleep<\/em>, in part based on earlier Black Mask<\/em> pieces. He wrote six more Marlowe adventures, including what are arguably his two finest: Farewell, My Lovely<\/em> (1940) and The Long Goodbye<\/em> (1953). The work of Chandler is much lighter in tone than that of Hammett.\u00a0 His detective, Marlowe, is characterised by his witty, ironic aloofness and his chivalric qualities, his moral make-up as a man of honour \u201cgood enough for any world\u201d (Chandler\u2019s phrase in \u201cThe Simple Art of Murder\u201d). As Chandler\u2019s editor Frank McShane says, \u201cChandler created a character who has become a part of American folk mythology, and in writing about Los Angeles, he depicted a world of great beauty and seamy corruption \u2013 the American reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the novels of Hammett and Chandler first appeared in novel form, they were published by Knopf as hardbacks.\u00a0 Once the paperback revolution gained momentum, however, their novels were also frequently reissued in paperback form, both in the US and the UK.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Goodis: \u201ca poet of the losers\u201d<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"Goodis<\/a><\/h3>\n

In 1946 David Goodis\u00a0published the first of his crime novels, Dark Passage<\/em>, and Delmar Daves\u00a0began filming it with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart (pictured above with Goodis).\u00a0 He signed a six\u2011year contract with Warners, but before the end of the \u201840s became disenchanted with the movie industry and retreated back to Philadelphia.\u00a0 Throughout the 1950s, he produced a dozen or so paperback originals for Gold Medal and Lion \u2013 now recognized as classics of noir fiction.<\/p>\n

The archetypal Goodis hero is a man trapped by a haunted past and a sordid present. More than any other writer in the genre, Goodis is obsessed with the lives of losers, victims, has-beens, outcasts and derelicts. His protagonists try to cheat fate, but are doomed to failure, and his narratives recurrently represent the destruction of their hopes and dreams.\u00a0 As Geoffrey O\u2019Brien writes, \u201cDavid Goodis is the mystery man of hardboiled fiction. … He wrote of winos and barroom piano players and small\u2011time thieves in a vein of tortured lyricism all his own. … He was a poet of the losers. If Jack Kerouac had written crime novels, they might have sounded a bit like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Goodis<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

Steve Fisher and Cornell Woolrich: the turn towards psychological noir<\/span><\/h3>\n

Both Steve Fisher and Cornell Woolrich started writing for pulp magazines in the 1930s and published paperback novels from the 1940s on.<\/p>\n

\"Woolrich<\/a>Fisher and Woolrich had begun to sell stories to\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u00a0in 1936, after the magazine\u2019s only woman editor, Fanny Ellsworth, had taken over. Ellsworth is credited by Keith Deutsch with deliberately and perceptively changing the course of\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>fiction:\u00a0 \u201cUnlike the unemotional, hard-boiled and \u2018objective\u2019 stories her predecessor as editor, Joseph Shaw (1926 to 1936), demanded and made famous, Fanny Ellsworth called for stories with heightened emotion that explored the interior life of the characters.\u201d\u00a0 Ellsworth encouraged Fisher and Woolrich, who shared a talent for presenting aberrant mental states and for creating tense and suspenseful plots.<\/p>\n

This dark new style and the focus on the psychology of crime enormously influenced both pulp originals and the screenplays that, from the 1940s on, led to the emergence of\u00a0film noir<\/em>: Deutsch writes, \u201cThe obsessive, dreamlike narration favored by Fisher and Woolrich in their tense crime tales was a perfect match for the dark shadows, and frightening, expressive camera angles of\u00a0film noir<\/em>.\u201d Steve Fisher\u2019s\u00a0I Wake Up Screaming<\/em>\u00a0(1940) was the basis for one of the earliest\u00a0films noirs<\/em>, and more\u00a0film noir\u00a0<\/em>screenplays were adapted from works by Woolrich than any other crime novelist.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Fisher-Woolrich<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith:\u00a0the killers inside us\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"The<\/a>Patricia Highsmith\u00a0published over twenty novels and several collections of short stories between 1950 and her death in 1995. Her first novel,\u00a0Strangers on a Train<\/em>,\u00a0was adapted for the screen by Hitchcock\u00a0in 1951, and her psychological thrillers formed the basis for more than two dozen other film adaptations. Jim Thompson wrote more than thirty novels from the late-1940s through the early 1970s, the majority of which were paperback\u00a0originals.\u00a0 At the time of his death, all of his novels were out of print in the US, and it is only since his death that his literary stature has been recognized. The French proclaimed Thompson to be \u201cle plus noir\u201d, the most American and the most pessimistic of the noir thriller writers. Highsmith, who lived for most of her adult life in France, was also better known and more highly respected in Europe than America.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Thompson and Highsmith created some of the most compelling and disturbing of all the transgressor-centred crime novels \u2013 Thompson in such first-person narratives as\u00a0The Killer<\/em>\u00a0Inside Me<\/em>\u00a0(1952) and\u00a0Pop. 1280<\/em>\u00a0(1964); and Highsmith in her Ripley novels, starting in 1955 with\u00a0The Talented Mr Ripley<\/em>. \u00a0Thompson is in many respects a very different writer from Highsmith, who would, for a start, never be grouped with the hard-boiled\u00a0school.\u00a0 But in their representations of psychopathic\u00a0personalities there are some striking similarities. The \u201cabnormally normal\u201d, \u201ceveryone’s next-door neighbour\u201d identity\u00a0of the killer is used as a means of implying that psychosis is in some ways a representative condition.\u00a0 Their killers’ minds are split between conformity\u00a0and violation.\u00a0 They are divergent enough to provide a cynically detached commentary on the milieu through which they move, but nevertheless simulate normality in an utterly plausible way.\u00a0 The effect is that, in looking at them, we both feel complicity\u00a0and see, reflected in their states of mind, the suppressed violence of a whole society.<\/p>\n

\"Thompson<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hard-Boiled and Noir Writers Featured in the 2011 Milne Archive Preview Exhibition The 2011 Milne Archive Preview Exhibition showcased the<\/p>\n

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